What makes a good Adventure?

[Jonathan Chung]

While the subject is a bit broad I hope to clarify my question shortly.  

I have been playing for a reasonable amount of time, ~ 10 years or so at this point, and in the course of that time, I have ran a few games, however they have without exception not last for any substancial length of time.  I've been out of the gaming circuit a bit during this summer and I hope to get back into it once I can gather a group of people at university to play Privateer Press' Witchfire Trillogy.


Now the problem is, or as I see it, I have no idea what are the components of a "good" adventure.  I can get story/campaign ideas up and started, however continuing them is a real chore for me, I guess because I can't break down my story ideas into sections properly or something.

So, any hints as to how best create adventures?



Jonathan

[Bankuei]

Hi Jonathan,

Welcome to the Forge!

Let's step back and focus the question from, "What's a good adventure?" to "What's a good conflict and how do I make solid preparations for play?" ?  Let me know if I'm way off here, but that seems to be a more accurate description of the subject.

With that in mind, if you haven't already, it may do you well to check out some of the games that get regular mention here, such as the Pool, Inspectres, Dust Devils, Trollbabe, or Riddle of Steel.  If you've checked out any of these, you'll notice that a fundamental feature is that you can't write out an "adventure" as most game book advice dictates- that is, you can't set up a series of events or a plot tree to manuever the players through- these games have rules set up that don't work with that.

So, given that there are many ways to play, the amount of preparation, and the style in which you do it will differ drastically.  The questions to ask yourself are:

-What is the focus of play?
-What can I make up, what do I need details for?
-How many details will I actually use, if ever?

The actual "content" such as monsters, mazes, artifacts, or the "structure" such as mysteries, plot twists, betrayals, revelations, etc.  are fairly irrelevant.  Depending on the style of play, here are some options:

-Preplotted session(Illusionism)- look at traditional storytelling techniques, cinema, playwriting, and literature are great.

-Narrativist play- Focus on a meaningful conflict that grabs your players, set up the factions and characters, but DO NOT preplan outcomes.

-Gamist play- Focus on neat, innovative challenges.  Videogames are a great place to find this kind of stuff.

Chris

[greedo1379]

I haven' DMed for a long time (a couple years at least) so take anything I say with a grain of salt.  And really, even when I did DM I don't think I was all that good at it.

Using the Forge vocabulary we were gamists.  The adventures I would run (and I think my players enjoyed) were basically the standard D&D B&E dressed up in fancy clothes (and sometimes in different genres).  SO any advice I give will be related to that.

With my disclaimer out of the way...

I found the best way to do adventures / campaigns was to imagine that I was watching a TV show.  Each session was a single episode.  Our sessions were usually short and my over arching campaign was never really planned out.  I would throw in red herrings pretty regularly that would turn out to not be red herrings.  Let me give you an example:

Session 1:
The heroes are sitting in a bar (it has to start in a bar, that's a rule :) ).  Some ragged fellow staggers in and says that there is an orc warlord that has destroyed his village and took prisoners.  Please rescue them.  The heroes (being heroes) go to rescue them and kill the orcs.  Standard adventure.

Session 2:
The heroes have returned back to the city adn are relaxing in their bar when armed guards break in and arrest the heroes.  They are brought before the king.  As it turns out, one of the prisoners was the princess (who was disguised to prevent ransoming *edit: and really it was to cover up the fact that I am planning this whole thing on the fly*) and the king wants to thank them for what they did.  On the way out the door, the king's assistant comes up and takes the heroes aside.  The king has a secret mission (super secret, you can't tell anyone) for them, to steal a gizmo from a nearby someplace.  They go and do it fighting monsters / enemy soldiers / whatever.

In subsequent sessions perhaps I would have the king's assistant really be a major villain who is plotting against the king and using the party as rubes.  Or maybe it would turn out that he is just a wormtongue-like minor villain and the real major villain is someone else or maybe the guy the heroes stole the gizmo from int he first place.  The whole thing was staged to lure the heroes into some other trap. *Edit - Or of course the assistant could be on the up and up and the super villain has yet to show his/her face.  Or this whole set of adventures could just be a minor detour in the whole campaign.  Just depending on how I feel the next week*

(All the above was just made up as I was typing)

I guess my point is just that you should take it all one step at a time.  Each session is an episode.  Look for some sort of conclusion at the end of each session.  Work out some characters in advance.  I said characters, not stats or extensive background.  If you don't need to know that the bartender is a level 3 fighter who had to kill his father because he turned to the Dark Side then don't worry about it.  Just make the character a quiet man with a sad but strong look about him and make up the details as you need them.

I don't know if I'm helping at all.  Sorry for rambling.  Great choice on adventures though.  The IK is fantastic.

[M. J. Young]

As Chris says, there are many ways to approach this.

It happens that I just outlined one way to do it in http://www.gamingoutpost.com/GL/index.cfm?action=ShowPublisher&PublisherID=81290">Game Ideas Unlimited: Antagonists, in which I suggest that an adventure can be built by working out what the villain is going to do and how it's going to draw the player characters into things. Since GO is having a few teething troubles as they make the transition to their new system, my recent articles have been free, so you should have little trouble reading it.

But let me turn the question on its head: if you were playing, what would you like to have in a good adventure? What makes the adventure worthwhile and fun, in your experience? If we can identify what you'd like to have happen in the game, we might be able to work out how to induce that to happen without trying to force anyone to play "your way".

--M. J. Young

[Kaare Berg]

There is a thread you might want to check out here. It shows several different approaches, and gently introduces concepts such as e-maps (emotion maps) and such joyous things.

Peace

K

[NN]

Toilet facilities.

[Apocalypse]

Fun?

What else makes a good adventure for a group of rpg PLAYERs.

How to achieve a session that actually made alot of fun, can have alot of different approaches, like some here mentionen with different theories.

But, imo the most important thing that was not mentioned is motivation.
Motivate your players, and motivate their charakters.

How to actually motivate a group can be very different, depends highly on playstyle/system your group use.

Imo still very time a good way to motivate players is, to envolve the story not to fast, and try to achieve the feel of a living breathing game world, which reacts to the SCs and where the SCs are part of it, with their wishes, needs, and actions. In good and bad times ;)

Lots more could be written, even alot more about the theories behind it, but imo, this is the real important thing.

[Comte]

I'm going to go with fun.  Here we like to throw around a lot of vocabluarly and we like to talk about some pretty high minded ideals.  But every complex conversation, theoretical debate, multiple pages of trying to define words like randomness all boil down to one thing, "How to make Role Playing Games fun again".  A good half of what I have gotten out of the Forge is pay atension to your players.  

At the end of the day the substance of an adventure really isn't important as long as they had fun playing it.

I'll use an example.  Long long ago there was a onversation going on here about Gamist games and audience or something like that.  One of the posters stated that GMing a gamist rule heavy game without knowing the rules is destined for disaster.  

It wasn't long after that I was allowed to take this challenge.  I got to GM Shadowrun for a group of vetren players who knew all the rules in all the sourcebooks backwards and fowards...and I still don't understand how combat works.  

Two of the players I had never met before and the other two were good freinds of mine.  Oddly enough I managed to pull it off.  Over the course of pulling it off I managed to break just about every guideline that the Forge has taught me.  I railroaded, I took control of player charecters, I metagamed, there were times where I declared smoke breaks because I couldn't think of what would happen next, and some other things.  

The plot was absurde, they had to steal a laser, thier choises was a convoy, a warehouse owned by Renraku, or a crazy old rich hunter.  If they went for the first choice they would of been led to the warehouse.  The players realized that the warehouse was so obscenely well defened that they couldn't break in without risking destroying the laser.  So after spending three hours at the warehouse they went to the rich old guys house and an hour latter they walked out with a sparkely new laser and several other toys.

It worked because I made the players laugh, I gave them toys to play with, I made them feel as cool as they wanted thier charecters to be.  Once the game ended everyone had storys to tell of thier charecters brave deeds and it was demanded that I gm again.

I am going to school to become a literary theorist.  So I can pump out a little jargon laden essay as to why my above example was sucessful.  However, it was because I listened to my audeince and I tried my very hardest to make sure that they had as much fun as possilbe.  My ideas, story, plot, charecters, all came second to them having fun.  And we did.

Now every play group has fun in a diffrent way.  A sucessful adventure is you hitting a good number of thouse things that they find fun, and being flexible enough so that when something isn't working you can change it.

[Doctor Xero]

Now the problem is, or as I see it, I have no idea what are the components of a "good" adventure.

Jonathan, I'd like to add a different approach than those already mentioned within this thread.

First, let me state that, as a game master, I focus a lot on character-oriented combination-narr-plus-sim campaigns with players who are monstrously brilliant at going off on tangents which all of us find just as interesting if not more so than any "official plot".  So I need simultaneously a good plot for those moments when players want direction and a good background so that I can ad lib like mad when the players plot their own direction.

What I've found is this : if players feel engaged directly or by way of their characters, they really don't care about plot or cinematic villainy.

First, I make certain that I have such a strong sense of the campaign setting -- locational, temporal, thematic, metaphysic, etc. -- that I can immediately figure out what is behind that wall I hadn't expected players to dig through or what the summoned fantasy godling will say or whether the extraterrestrial shadow menace will be surprised (well, as surprised as the game master is!) by the inspired notion to attempt psychic contact.

Players tell me that the setting is always another character in its own right in the campaigns I run, and I agree.

Thus, the setting itself engages players through their characters in the same way that another character might engage them.

Second, I most often plot a specific day's game around one or more specific characters.  I look over character sheets and character write-ups and player commentary and look for hooks, requests, temptations, etc.  For example, if a player has given his fantasy character the restriction "always falls obediently in love with exotic men" and the restriction "terrified of spiders", I might construct a sexy spider man for his character to interact with, and we all watch as the player and the player's character together handle this externalized inner conflict.  If a player has given her space opera character a background which includes a love-hate relationship with an uptight ex-husband, I might introduce this ex-husband into play -- often consulting with the player herself to see which player (or game master) she wishes to see play her character-specific NPC.  If a player has gone to the effort to describe in detail in a character write-up how much her player enjoys chances to show off his dance skill, how can I not create a plot which involves a dance contest?

A major villain who eats puppies just to hear them squeal is never so interesting as a beloved brother who started sacrificing puppies to dark gods to attain a revenge which both he and the player-character have craved but which the player-character alone realized was not worth the cost to achieve.

Third, I take into consideration personal interests of the players -- with their permission.  If a player wants to figure out how the part of himself animated through his character would have responded to the temptation of Sauron's ring, and if dealing with such a question fits the campaign and will not ruin the game for the other players, I might construct a plot which eventually leads to said player's character finding a mighty evil artifact not unlike the One Ring.  If a player wants to deal with how her elf character would rationalize owning dwarf slaves, and if it will not ruin the campaign or the other players' fun, I might try to find a way for her character to inherit or otherwise gain dwarf slaves.  Most importantly, if a player does NOT want his or her character to deal with such issues -- I STAY AWAY FROM THOSE ISSUES.  I am a game master, not a coercive therapist.

Fourth, I always strive for variety.  For this reason, even though I run almost exclusively combination-narr-plus-sim campaigns, every once in a while I will run a no-frills fun-but-primal dungeon crawl or star-base seige or defeat the monster episode.

I find that if you follow the above four approaches, focusing the game on the players' characters and the players, the campaign flows well, the individual episodes flow well, and the players tend to love recounting stories not about what happened but about what they did as characters (facing and dealing with quandaries) and as players (teasing the game master with in-character tangents)!

I hope this helps, Jonathan.

Doctor Xero

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

One thing I would suggest is to make sure the characters always have a stake in what's going on in the game world and that the players care about it.  Often, in the course of a single long running campaign, I will offer to the PCs changes to what they are going after, care about, or compelled by.  Also, giving the PCs short term goals that have long term consiquences helps keep the game alive for a longer period.

A lot of this is going to be individual.  I recomend MJ's article as a good starting point.  Just remember the players arent that different from you and therefore will have interests just like you do.  Find them and exploit them.

Peace,

-Troy Costisick